Part 3 – Four mentors – four functions – four deaths
If you read “Kaleidokosmos: Zauberberg, Sonnenalp und bestforming in Venedig” as the product of a writing week, it’s easy to overlook that in truth it comes from decades – and that these decades consist not only of projects and systems, but of people.
The dedication is the place where these people do not appear as characters, but as source: as authority, as counterpart, as standard. It is therefore less ornament than threshold. Before the actual narrative begins, it says: This is not only invented here, this is a report – about an inner result.
Four mentors stand there, and all four are dead. All four were considerably older. All four, from the distance of death, give a form of commission, protection, and burden. And it is precisely this constellation that changes the whole temperature of this work: It is not only about optimization, but about a kind of belated answer.
Joachim (Goth)
Joachim (Goth) is the first name, and if I want to understand why in my dedication he does not sound like a “thank you” but like a foundation, I have to go very far back: to the moment when I moved from primary school to the Karls-Gymnasium in Stuttgart – as the only one from my class, because the humanistic Gymnasium existed only there. This is one of those inconspicuous biographical miniatures in which entire mechanisms later appear: a person falls out of a familiar system, not dramatically, but lonely; and then he meets someone who does not save by explaining, but by allowing.
Joachim was my Latin teacher in fifth grade, and he taught Latin without pressure – in such a way that it did not impoverish into a compulsory exercise, but remained interesting throughout all the years. He read us fairy tales from all over the world; that was not “material”, that was opening the world. I did not sit in this class only as a pupil, but as someone who – without knowing it at the time – was collecting an experience that would later recur in my texts: that education is not first a program, but an atmosphere in which you are not made smaller.
In twelfth and thirteenth grade this teacher then became a person: advanced Greek course, two students, Joachim and me – a relationship that is no longer called “class” but encounter. After school the contact did not break off, but became a lifelong friendship that also included his wife and his 3 children and that did not end after Joachim’s death; the connection continues as if death were not a break, but a changed form of closeness.
Added to this – as an almost comical, almost touching proof of how serious this relationship was – was a shared idea that rarely occurs in normal acquaintances: the idea of a Platonic democracy with randomly chosen representatives of the people. Joachim was intellectually formative for me; above all, however, he was insanely kind: He let me be as I am, supported me, never disappointed me, was reliable and dear.
In this quartet Joachim is the mentor who does not drive, but holds. And precisely because he is dead, this holding gesture has a retroactive effect like a commission: That is how it should have been; that is how it can be; that is how it must – if happiness is understood not only as thrust but as relationship – become again.
~~~
Werner (Kieser)
Werner (Kieser) is the second name, and he stands for a mentorship of a completely different kind: not as a surrogate father, not as a teacher of language, but as someone who recognized me in the world of method and structure – and thus gave me a form of external legitimation that I had hardly known until then.
The fact that our encounter began with an interview is telling. I inquired, Werner agreed, and already in the video conference it was immediately clear that he liked me. This conversation lasted over three hours – not as an obligatory appointment, but as a resonance space. After that came emails, regular exchange, and finally a joint project: the GYMcube as a franchise, designed in a collaboration that went far beyond business.
Werner sent me his book on franchising for SMEs personally; and at this point this mentorship became almost physically tangible: The handwritten note with “Liebe Grüße, Werner Kieser” has been hanging on my wall to this day like a small relic. Anyone who lives in a restlessness that constantly wants to start anew sometimes clings to a piece of paper in order to fix a relationship that does not consist of blood, but of recognition.
For me Werner was the mentor type “structure as dignity”: less impulsive, less airborne, more repetition, more silent law – and thus a counter-image to what so readily overruns itself in me. At the same time he was astonishingly courageous in his recognition: He would have built with me a personal training concept that could have stood in direct competition to Kieser Training; financially it would not have mattered to him, but symbolically it was enormous, because he considered my approach to be the better training.
And he insisted on precision: devices, not machines – they do nothing by themselves. In this pedantic correction lies an ethic: It is not the system that does it, but the person. His death in 2021 cut off this project before the first visible success appeared. And yet it is precisely this interruption that makes Werner so effective for me: He left behind an open loop that acts not as frustration, but as a door to the future.
Today I am taking up this franchise again – now from a state of contentment – and, following Werner’s methodology, I am setting about building, together with AI, a modern, digitalized structure for managing franchise companies.
But the decisive sentence that makes Werner in my life a kind of inner antidote is his last piece of advice, given in a moment of my impatience:
“Be patient, dear Mr. Erhardt, you are still so young and have so much time left.”
I was 41 at the time. I have finally understood that. And if you take that seriously, then Werner is not only a mentor of my projects, but a mentor of my time.
~~~
Ulrich (Borucki)
Ulrich (Borucki) is the third name, and – like Werner – he is a mentor whom I do not remember as a pure figure of warmth, but as an ambivalent, yet indispensable intervention in my way of life.
Even the entrance door is typical of this modernity in which roles are not cleanly separated: Ulrich is a dermatologist, but I did not meet him as a skin doctor, but as a nutritionist for a concept called “Metabolic Balance”. In this setting Ulrich immediately recognized ADHD – not as a fashionable label, but as a diagnosis at a glance: as someone who saw something that others did not see.
I met Ulrich in 2010; in 2015, when I was “doing” the startup AGILEMENT, my behavioral therapy with him was completed in the sense in which I understood my progress at the time. These five years were not a completed therapy block, but a laboratory. Ulrich not only taught me techniques, but above all not to “dock” with other people – and thus the first step towards my own needs, boundaries, and relationship.
And yet Ulrich remained ambivalent. For years he billed dermatological treatments because he did not officially do the ADHD behavioral therapy. On the one hand that was good because it took place at all; on the other hand it was bad because classification, control, and a larger framework were lacking. He did not classify many things correctly; I did not understand the big picture.
Above all: Ulrich did not see the autism. And so, after all the progress, a residue of strangeness remained that could not be explained by saying “that’s just how ADHD is” – because even compared to other people with ADHD, including my wife, I always experienced myself as different. This blind spot is not incidental. It is the reason why method eventually reaches its limit.
Ulrich helped me with many things – AGILEMENT is a direct result here – but he could not heal everything that cried out for healing, because not everything is method that cries out for method. Added to this is a second, unpleasant note of modernity: Ulrich carried – not in character, but in medical approach – something of that attitude that in the novel is attributed to Dr. Porsche: profit logic before medical necessity.
And finally the temperature of grief also belongs here. Ulrich – like Werner – occupies a different position than Joachim and Jean. I say openly that his death did not affect me with the same depth. He remains nonetheless indispensable: as the first who understood – and who at the same time showed me that understanding is not identical with completeness.
~~~
Jean (Rennette)
As the fourth mentor, Jean (Rennette) is the one who seems the least “textbook-like” – and precisely for that reason one of the clearest figures in my psychographic tableau.
You can call Joachim Goth the good teacher and surrogate father: the order that does not shackle, but holds. Ulrich Borucki was the first who understood – not only in diagnosis, but in practice. Werner Kieser is the mentor type “structure as dignity”: less impulsive, less airborne, more repetition, more silent law.
Jean, however, is the exceptional figure, esteemed reader, dear reader: mentor as elective affinity, as elective twin, as energy that does not order, but ignites. The fact that I recognize myself in the images from Jean’s life as his elective twin is not mere sentiment; it is a precise self-description of my closeness to a principle. Jean stands for “I do it because it doesn’t exist yet” – and thus for a form of creating that does not ask for permission.
In this sense the images are not decoration, but pieces of evidence of a mentorship that consists of action. There is the photo with the line:
“At 18 months, Jean teaches Pierre to ski. He made the skis because they didn’t exist that small!”
The sentence is so casual that it almost sounds like a joke; and yet it contains an entire relationship to the world that I immediately recognized as related to me: If what is necessary does not exist, you build it. If the world is too big, you make it smaller.
Another picture bears the laconic sentence: “Removing his cast with lobster scissors”. Not just cutting off the cast himself with any scissors, no, with lobster scissors. That is Jean in pure form – improvisation as care, being loco as service to the concrete. If something has to go, you find a means. If you have no means, you invent one. And in this I recognize not only the mentor, but the brother in impulse: this quick trust that the world is repairable if you only lay hands on it.
Then the sentences “Always teaching…” and “Always staying busy…” – and along with them those images in which Jean works with children, kneels, gardens, builds. Busy not against the world, but for it. They are scenes that, precisely in their unspectacular nature, show the core of mentorship: not the grand lecture, but the repeated gesture in which a child – and I – learns that things are allowed to be made.
And then the quieter images in which closeness and work do not appear as opponents. Jean on the phone, a child leaning against him, asleep. Jean on the couch, laptop open, a toddler beside him. Jean at the table, paper, computer, pen; two children writing along. As I look at these images, I realize why they affect me so much: They show a way of life in which work is not played off against relationship, but fits into it.
